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OMERO.web is a Python client of the OMERO platform that provides a
web-based UI and JSON API.
This section provides guidance on how to install and set up OMERO.web on
any of the supported UNIX and UNIX-like platforms. Specific walkthroughs are
provided for several systems, with detailed step-by-step instructions.
OMERO.web can be either installed separately from
the OMERO.server or installed with the OMERO.server.
Deploying separately is recommended as they
perform best under different circumstances and require a different set of
dependencies.

If you have installed NGINX, OMERO can automatically generate a
configuration file for your webserver. The location of the file will depend
on your system, please refer to your webserver’s manual. See
Customizing your OMERO.web installation for additional
customization options.

Depending upon which platform you are using, you may find a
more specific walkthrough listed below.

Instructions for installing OMERO.web from scratch on
on Mac OS X with Homebrew. It is aimed at developers
since typically MacOS X is not suited for serious deployment.

Note

Support for Apache deployment has been dropped in 5.3.0.

If your organization’s policies only allow Apache to be used as the external-facing web-server you should configure Apache to proxy connections to an NGINX instance running on your OMERO server i.e. use Apache as a reverse proxy. For more details see
Apache mod_proxy documentation.

This guide uses the example of deploying OMERO.web separately from OMERO.server with
NGINX and Gunicorn.
If you opt to install OMERO.web with the OMERO.server, change OMERO.py
to OMERO.server in the commands below.

The currently supported version of the django module used by
OMERO.web (1.8) requires Python 2.7. The older version (1.6)
will work with Python 2.6 but lacks security support, and is
consequently not recommended for production use. Python 2.7
and Django 1.8 are required for security support.

For production servers you may need to add additional directives to the
configuration file, for example to enable
HTTPS.
As an alternative to manually modifying the generated file you can generate
a minimal configuration:

In order to offer users the ability to download data from OMERO.web you have
to deploy using EXPERIMENTAL: Async workers.
OMERO.web is able to handle multiple clients on a single worker
thread switching context as necessary while streaming binary data from
OMERO.server. Depending on the traffic and scale of the repository you should
configure connections and speed limits on your server to avoid blocking
resources. We recommend you run benchmark and performance tests.
It is also possible to apply Download restrictions and
offer alternative access to binary data.

The following configuration options marked as EXPERIMENTAL have yet to be extensively tested in a
production environment, use at your own risk.

OMERO.web deployment can be configured with sync and async workers.
Sync workers are faster and recommended for a data repository with
Download restrictions. If you wish to offer users the ability
to download data then you have to use async workers; read more about
Download limitations above.